Setting Up and Troubleshooting Bugzilla with Tracker

Bugzilla is a popular Tracker integration and fairly straightforward to set up. In general, all you need is here. But if you do receive an error message instead of bugs loading in your Bugzilla integration panel, here are some tips to get past them. The following also applies to other error messages, but these are the most common: “Unable to load bugs. Please check your URL and remember to include http:// and exclude the xmlrpc.cgi.” or “Unable to load bugs. There was a problem processing your request.” You can take the first error literally, but there are also some other causes for it which aren’t obvious.

We only support versions 3.4.x and above.

If you haven’t changed the integration’s “Bug ‘Status’ values to exclude” (currently RESOLVED, VERIFIED, CLOSED), these defaults could be trying to pull in too much data and hence failing. To check, log in to your Bugzilla instance and use the advanced search options to find a small number of bugs, to help you change the default values to exclude all but those, and see if they’ll be pulled in.

You may need to install one or more optional Perl modules, i.e. SOAP-Lite and possibly Test-Taint. To determine if you have them installed (or to get the commands necessary to install them), go to the directory where you installed Bugzilla on your server and run the checksetup.pl script. It will tell you what modules are installed, and what optional modules can be installed (and what they will enable). Check to see if these modules are there and if not, install them.Once that’s done, you can test it using the following. To run this you’ll need access to a machine that has the CURL command. Create a file called version.xml with the following text:Bugzilla.versionThen run this curl command:curl -X POST -H"Content-Type: text/xml" -d @version.xml <url of your Bugzilla server>/xmlrpc.cgi To see a successful version request, run the command against the Bugzilla “Landfill” test server. For example: curl -X POST -H"Content-Type: text/xml" -d @version.xml https://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-4.0-branch/xmlrpc.cgi If all is well, the response should look like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><methodresponse><params><param/><value><struct><member><name>version</name><value><string>4.0.2</string></value></member></struct></value></param></params></methodresponse> If the response printed by the curl command accessing your Bugzilla server is like this, then the Tracker integration should be able to access your Bugzilla server. If this is not the kind of response you get, then your server is still not setup correctly. In general the response’s content should help you troubleshoot. For example, if contains, “The XML-RPC Interface feature is not available in this Bugzilla.” it means you need to enable the XMLRPC interface on your Bugzilla server. However, if you are using version 4.0.5, a bad response (such as “Application failed during request deserialization: 32612: When using XML-RPC, you cannot send data as text/xml; charset=utf-8. Only text/xml and application/xml are allowed.”) could be the result of this Bugzilla bug. It’s been fixed in the patch referenced in the bug, but by the time you read this, there may be more recent updates.

Another problem can be with the data that is being transferred to Tracker, if there are one or more bugs which contain multibyte characters in the description or comments. This is usually a result of pasting text into a bug from rich text email or office documents. These characters cause the length of the data stream that the web server sends to us to be incorrect, and we are unable to parse the XML on our side. In that case, determining if your bugs have any multi-byte characters and removing them, should resolve the problem. We can provide steps to help you with this if you need them.

The above should cover the most common problems. Hope it helps. Finally, we get asked if you can integrate Tracker with Bugzilla if it’s behind your firewall. Yes, we have API servers that you can allow through your firewalls for Pivotal Tracker integration with your Bugzilla server. Please refer to our integrations help page for more information. If you have any questions, or there’s something this doesn’t cover, please email us.